Romero's odyssey to Santa Fe: From simulation to real life

Many a researcher in evolutionary robotics would love to have at his or her disposal a real
population of bopping critters. Toward this end, the ultimate goal of our work is twofold:
(1) to build a robot that is cheap, modular, and adaptable; and (2) to use a population of
such robots in evolutionary-robotics experiments. As a frst step in the study of adaptive
robotics using populations of cheap robots, we have designed the Lausanne trail, a real-world version of the simulated Santa Fe trail. We use Lego-based robots equipped with
low-cost sensors and actuators to evolve solutions in the real world to the trail-following
problem. We describe two different sets of experiments and conclude that the real-world
problem exhibits fundamental differences from the virtual one; in particular, the robot's
lack of positional information hinders greatly its performance. We propose to study in
the future collective map building, an important and interesting problem, which will,
among others, provide a solution to the Lausanne-trail problem